Flanked by fellow legislators and drug policy reform leaders, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) held a press conference yesterday in his office on Capitol Hill to announce the details of legislation that would eliminate federal criminal sanctions for possession of marijuana.

The “Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults Act of 2008,” also known as H.R. 5843, would remove federal criminal penalties for personal possession of up to 100 grams of marijuana or the nonprofit transfer of up to an ounce of marijuana. It would not change the federal statutes forbidding cultivation, import, export or for-profit sale of marijuana.

Co-sponsors of the bill include Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), Ron Paul (R-Texas) and William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.).

The sacrifices to public health and safety made in the name of marijuana enforcement and prosecution are horrifying. 829,625 people arrested for marijuana law offenses in 2006, 89 percent for mere possession. Taxpayers are stuck with the multibillion-dollar bill for these hundreds of thousands of marijuana arrests, which consume 4.5 million law enforcement hours — the equivalent of taking 112,500 law enforcement officers off the streets. (See my previous blog post on this bill for further analysis.)

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is unlikely that marijuana decriminalization would lead to an increase in marijuana use. As the World Health Organization detailed in its recent report, the U.S. has the highest rate of marijuana use in the world despite some of the most punitive drug policies. In the U.S., 42.4 percent of people have used marijuana, compared to just 19.8 percent in the Netherlands, where marijuana has been decriminalized for decades.

People seem to be paying attention. CNN posted a favorable story, which was ranked as the most viewed article on CNN’s site for most of the day.

The drug czar sure is paying attention. As Nick Juliano at The Raw Story reported, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) was so troubled by yesterday’s press conference that they sent “chief scientist” David Murray and two aides to dispense materials to reporters and make a statement to the press immediately following the conference. One of the materials distributed to reporters was a “Marijuana Sourcebook” called, “Marijuana: The Greatest Cause of Illegal Drug Abuse.”

Federal drug law is so corrupted to the core that ONDCP is actually bound by statutory obligation to use taxpayer funds to lobby against any attempt to change drug laws within the U.S. Thanks to a little-known statute pushed through by Mark Souder (R-Ind.), Congress has mandated that the Director of ONDCP “take such actions as necessary to oppose any attempt to legalize the use of a substance (in any form) that—(A) is listed in Schedule I…; and (B) has not been approved for medical purposes by the Food and Drug Administration.”

While it is highly doubtful that Frank’s bill will pass this year or anytime soon, it could help bolster state-based efforts to decriminalize marijuana. After all, state and local agencies carry the brunt of enforcing, prosecuting, and incarcerating marijuana offenders, yet it is also state and local budgets that are being squeezed tightest by the current economic downturn.

In addition to the 12 states the decriminalized marijuana in the 1970s, several others are well on their way — Nevada came close to passing a ballot initiative in 2006, Massachusetts voters will decide the issue this November, and other states such as Washington, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Montana have taken steps that could lead to decriminalization over the next few years. In addition, a number of cities such as Denver, Seattle, Oakland and San Francisco — as well as a handful of smaller towns and cities —have passed measures mandating police treat marijuana law violations as the “lowest law enforcement priority.”

Let your Congressional Representative know that this issue is a priority. Take a few seconds to urge him or her to co-sponsor and support this historic legislation by sending a personalized message to your Congressional Representative.

Late yesterday we won a voting rights case that the ACLU and the Native American Rights Fund brought against the Alaskan state and local election officials for not providing language assistance to voters who speak Yup’ik, the primary language of Bethel residents.

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, the city of Bethel has a population of 5,471, 61.8 percent of whom are Alaska Native or American Indian. So to say this decision affects a lot of people would be an understatement.

The decision requires the state to provide trained poll workers who are bilingual in English and Yup’ik; sample ballots in written Yup’ik; a written Yup’ik glossary of election terms; consultation with local tribes to ensure the accuracy of Yup’ik translations; a Yup’ik language coordinator; and pre-election and post-election reports to the court tracking the state’s efforts.

Prior to the lawsuit, Alaska was in violation of the language assistance provisions of the Voting Rights Act by not adequately translating voting materials or election information into Yup’ik. One egregious example of how poor translations to Yup’ik were: A translation of a 2002 statewide natural gas ballot question used the Yup’ik word for flatulence.

That really says it all (or something).

Earlier this week, the Government Accountability Office released a human rights report (PDF) documenting the abuse and exploitation of domestic workers by foreign diplomats in the U.S. As described by Kirk Semple on the New York Times blog, this is a widespread but largely hidden problem that is greatly exacerbated by the shield of diplomatic immunity and the government’s refusal to hold diplomats responsible even in the most egregious cases.

The State Department issues each of these domestic workers a special visa to come to this country to work for a specific diplomat, and the Department is well aware of the extremely vulnerable position this puts the workers in – both because diplomats’ homes (to which domestic workers are often confined) are off-limits to U.S. law enforcement and as a result of the power the visa arrangement gives diplomats over their workers’ ability to remain in this country. But thus far, the State Department has refused to accept responsibility for what happens to these workers once they have arrived in the U.S. Just last week, in a statement of interest filed with the court in a case brought on behalf of three Indian women enslaved by a Kuwaiti diplomat, the State Department, as it has in the past, insisted that United States courts can do nothing to hold foreign diplomats accountable for extreme human rights abuses, even when the abuses rise to the level of human trafficking and slavery.

The GAO report both documents and is itself an illustration of one of the key failures of the U.S. government to address this problem: there is no systematic tracking or protection of workers who are brought to the U.S. by foreign diplomats. The report is a first step towards documenting diplomatic abuse and exploitation, but in leaving out any details about the 42 cases it investigated, it fails to bring to light the reality of this problem. In November 2007 the ACLU created our own spreadsheet of the 59 cases we were aware of to date, containing as many details as we were able to access about the workers, diplomats, and types of abuses.

As Caroline Frederickson wrote yesterday on the Huffington Post, legislation is required to tackle the web of problems that have allowed these injustices to continue for so long.

To read profiles of domestic workers who have come forward and to learn more about the ACLU’s work on this issue, check out: www.aclu.org/domesticworkers.

When it comes to China, the Olympics and surveillance, OpenLeft’s Daniel DeGroot reminds us of a very good point: When it comes to privacy safeguards, China, along with the United States, the U.K. and Russia, are "black"—meaning, the worst of the worst— on Privacy International’s map of the world’s surveillance societies.

We enumerated back in January the Bush administration policies that won us this dubious distinction.

For those of you who are heading to China for some good, old-fashioned fun (under the watchful eyes of the thousands surveillance cameras the Chinese government has installed, for your and the athletes’ safety, of course), The New York Times has collected the numerous handy guides for journalists covering the human rights situation in China. They’re intended for journos, but are useful for anyone who wishes to communicate—or blog—under the radar (so to speak).

Great, great, great news! (How often do we get to say that, huh?)

Earlier this morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee met and passed, by a voice vote, reauthorization of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA). Since the 1970s, this landmark law has been providing critical protections for youth who find themselves in the criminal justice system.

Not only was an important bill advanced, but it was actually strengthened by an amendment that was offered by Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland and adopted on a bipartisan vote (listen, I’m as surprised as you, dear readers). The Cardin Amendment corrects a loophole in the JJDPA that allows so-called “status offenders” — youth whose offenses would not be considered criminal but for their age — to be placed in detention under certain circumstances.

What are status offenses you ask? They include things like violating curfew, being truant from school and running away from home. Studies have shown that there are better alternatives to confinement and more appropriate interventions for these young people that could draw them away from the school-to-prison pipeline and towards becoming productive members of society. Sen. Cardin deserves thanks (as do the 10 other Judiciary Committee members who voted in favor of the amendment) for helping to make sure this will happen.

Surely that must be all right? Amazingly enough, no! Last night, there was concern over a proposed amendment by Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona that would have given prosecutors vast powers to try youth in the adult system (PDF). This would have been a real poison pill, but, at the last minute, Kyl chose not to offer it (something about waiting until the legislation gets to floor). I like thinking that maybe he saw the writing on the wall. If not that, then hopefully he recognized that that putting youth into the adult system not only makes them extremely vulnerable to abuse behind bars, but also greatly increases the chances that they will commit crimes down the road.

All in all, it was a great morning for those of us who care about improving the juvenile justice system.

(Originally posted on Daily Kos.)

On Wednesday, we discovered that the government may actually be more intent on covering up its own criminality than in establishing Hamdan’s. Or perhaps the prosecution simply recognizes that an acquittal is virtually inconceivable in any military commission trial. Whatever the reason, the government demonstrated that it would rather lose the testimony of a key witness than allow Guantánamo’s secret interrogation regime to be exposed to public or judicial scrutiny.

At issue was whether Robert McFadden, a Special Agent of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service — the only government witness who purports to have heard Hamdan reveal that he swore bayat, or allegiance, to Osama Bin Laden (Hamdan says he didn’t) — would be permitted to testify. But it was soon apparent that far more was at stake than the testimony of a single witness. The dispute threatened to expose a very different Guantánamo than the one portrayed in the government’s case.

Hamdan and his lawyers have long contended that the prosecution’s Guantánamo — where polite, well-spoken FBI and military investigators bring McDonald’s French fries to detainees and conduct professional, non-coercive interrogations — is at best a small part of the story. Wholly absent from the government’s case are agents of "unnamed" agencies who wake detainees in the dead of night and apply interrogation techniques long banned by civilized nations.

For years, Hamdan’s lawyers have demanded that the government turn over records not only of the polite interrogations conducted by polished prosecution witnesses, but of all interrogations of Hamdan, so that the court could properly evaluate whether his statements were provided voluntarily. Hamdan alleged in earlier proceedings that he himself had been exposed to sleep deprivation and even sexual humiliation by a female interrogator — allegations that government lawyers ridiculed. But Hamdan was telling the truth.

Although the government has had five years to collect these critical records, Hamdan’s lawyers received many of them just days before trial, and others not until after the trial had begun — a truly shocking violation of discovery rules made all the more remarkable by the stakes of this case. We learned today that one of those documents includes a female interrogator’s account of her sexual humiliation of Hamdan. Others describe his being woken repeatedly in the night and moved between cells — including the night before his interview with Special Agent McFadden. On Monday, the military judge had instructed the government that, as sanction for its failure to provide those critical documents in a timely manner, McFadden would be barred from testifying — unless the government could demonstrate convincingly that Hamdan had not been mistreated.

But the government did no such thing, nor did it really even try. It did not present a single witness who was involved in Hamdan’s late-night interrogations, or even in his detention. Quite simply, the government preferred to risk losing a witness who, in an ordinary proceeding, would be deemed absolutely critical to its conspiracy charge against Hamdan, than be forced to put CIA and military intelligence officers on the stand to testify about their routine abuse of detainees.

Although we remain in the dark about the damning details of Hamdan’s treatment by intelligence officers, we did hear some of the more prosaic details of Hamdan’s camp disciplinary record, as detailed meticulously in the "military police desk blotter." Hamdan, we learned, had become "aggressive" and "outraged" and had used "derogatory language towards guard staff" on one occasion when he was denied a soccer ball — presumably when he was living in communal housing prior to his transfer into solitary confinement. On a few occasions Hamdan was discovered with "contraband," begging certain obvious questions and reminding me, unavoidably, of this. One entry noted a "positive behavior status report" (evidently a good thing) for which Hamdan was rewarded, heartbreakingly, with two family photographs. Even Guantánamo’s small kindnesses somehow manage to invoke its cruelty.

Notwithstanding their complete failure to explain why Hamdan would have been deprived of sleep the night before a critical interrogation, government lawyers insisted that there should be no sanction: to exclude testimony, the prosecution contended, would be to "cast sort of a dark cloud over the agents and those who worked with the detainees." But this is exactly backwards. The "dark cloud" has been hovering over Guantánamo for years. It was Donald Rumsfeld who, as early as December, 2002 approved the use of "hooding," "exploitation of phobias," "stress positions," sleep deprivation, and other inhumane tactics for use on detainees here. It was the government that turned the Guantánamo detention facility into a virtual laboratory for cruel and coercive interrogations — and that now insists on being able to prosecute detainees while keeping that cruelty under tight seal.

It was left to one of Hamdan’s civilian lawyers, Seattle attorney Harry Schneider, to sum up the feeling of many observers of this sad spectacle. "It’s not a happy day," Schneider argued, when Mr. Hamdan’s testimony must be considered more credible than the testimony of government agents. "It’s my country, too."

At Guantánamo Bay, sometimes we need that reminder.

This morning, Adaora Udoji (who joined us at our Membership Conference last month) and John Hockenberry interviewed Ben Wizner from Guantánamo for The Takeaway on NPR. Ben is at Gitmo as a human rights observer of the trial of Salim Ahmed Hamdan. He’s pretty sanguine about what the outcome of the trial will be. He says:

Hamdan is not here to be acquitted. He’s going to be convicted. They didn’t fly in all these colonels and lieutenant colonels from around the country to come here and acquit Hamdan.

Ben predicts that after Hamdan’s conviction, Hamdan’s case will be appealed in a U.S. federal court—as is his right according to the Military Commissions Act—and that the case could very well end up in front of the Supreme Court again.

Listen to the interview.

There’s been a good development in the case of Jeremiah Johnson, the Peace Corps volunteer whose services were summarily terminated when he tested positive for HIV. Johnson, you might remember, was told he could not finish his service in the Ukraine or anywhere else even though he was asymptomatic.

After pressure from the ACLU, and many current and former volunteers, the Peace Corps administration has had a change of heart, agreeing that it will no longer automatically terminate volunteers with HIV. The Peace Corps has promised to conduct an individual assessment of each volunteer who tests positive to determine the best steps to take to protect the volunteer’s health while also allowing the volunteer to continue his or her service when feasible.

Accountability is the key to the effectiveness of any new policy, so let’s all of us make sure that this is one promise the Peace Corps administration doesn’t forget to keep.

Robert Nakatani is a Senior Strategist with the ACLU’s LGBT & AIDS Project. He was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone from 1968 – 1971.

Visit Get Busy, Get Equal to learn what you can do to fight for LGBT rights.

According to Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), wholesale government spying on Americans? A-ok. But surveillance of Internet use in foreign-owned hotels in China? Not if he can help it!

ThinkProgress reports that Sen. Brownback, who voted for the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program twice—once last year for the Protect America Act and just last month for the FISA Amendments Act—is just outraged over this.

When asked about the difference between the Chinese and American spying practices, Brownback said, "We don’t put the hardware and software on hotels." He added that the Chinese program can be used "on journalists," "on athletes," "on their families," "democracy advocates," and "human rights advocates" — seemingly oblivious that all these groups could be spied on here as well.

Threat Level also sagely points out that the government, via the FBI, was already spying on advocates, as our Freedom of Information Act request revealed.

Now, we actually agree with Sen. Brownback that this is outrageous; we don’t believe in that kind of surveillance, period. But where are your priorities, Senator? Is protecting the privacy of Olympic tourists more important that protecting Americans’ right to privacy? It’s in the Constitution, for chrissake!

Less than an hour after President Bush signed the FISA Amendments Act, the ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging the new law. We also filed another legal motion with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), requesting that any review of the new law be open to the public to the extent possible, and that we are allowed to make arguments against it. Not asking for much, right?

A few weeks ago, the FISC ordered the government to respond to that motion, and late yesterday, the government did just that. It its response, the Bush administration asked that FISC not to accept any legal briefs from the ACLU or anyone else but the Justice Department, and that any review of the FISA law be kept secret. We can’t say we’re surprised by this.